Joyce's first great epiphany (in Portrait of the Artist)

After you get through the tedium of the sermons in James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," you come to a beautiful section of the novel: Stephen Dedalus goes back to his room (he's in a boarding school, called a college but would be at today's h.s level; he's 16, we later learn) and shudders in the fear of sin and damnation, becomes ill, decides to reform his life and go to confession, and wanders through the streets of Dublin (foreshadowing of Ulysses) and finds a church, gives confession, the priest is very thoughtful and kind, Dedalus feels he's on a new course in life. Then, the next section of the novel, he's a bit older, and a priest comes to him in his room and suggests that Dedalus might have a "vocation," so he wrestles with that idea - gos home to his family, now living in difficult poverty but with a certain spirit - they all sing together, for example - and we see him (I'm not totally sure of the sequence here) deciding he cannot shut his life up as a Jesuit priest - he wants to live in the world, struggle with ideas, make something, create - the beginnings of his thinking of himself as an artist. He looks down from a bridge, sees some boys diving from the rocks, then sees a beautiful girl standing in the water and he follows her - this is the first of Joyce's great "epiphanies," a moment or an episode that has an emotional meaning far beyond the bare facts of the event - the kind of moment we all have in our lives but that's very elusive, difficult to capture even in the mind much less to memorialize it in language and art.